“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

I’m going to change it around a bit and just list seven “notable” songs I’ve been listening to recently. Not necessarily good or bad, but worth mentioning.

1) Magnetic Fields – Born on a Train
I’d never even heard of this this band, but I knew that a band with the name “Magnetic Fields” existed, so I only stumbled upon this song while looking for a musical accompaniment to this movie. It’s beautiful. So is With Whom To Dance, which reminded me instantly of…

2) Chumbawamba – Learning To Love
Probably because they lifted the tune wholesale, as good folk music so often does. Fitting, as both the songs’ lyrics deal with similar conundra, but Chumba go so far as to provide a solution in their case.

3) Apocalyptica – Fade To Black
Listened to this today because I had to explain to someone why this band is great in theory but lacking in execution. Even when they add a drummer, they still never seem to capture the heaviness of their source material. Cellos have an huge dynamic range, and skilled (and creative) cellists can squeeze more sounds out of a cello than Tom Morello can out of a guitar. This band, however, bores me to tears.

4) The Ex & Tom Cora – State of Shock
Speaking of skilled cellists… It was a dead heat between this and Hidegen Fújnak a Szelek (based on the Hungarian folk song, which Chumba also eventually borrowed). This won out because I could find the a link to the version with Tom. Sometimes I like to listen to music in odd orders—alphabetical by band or chronological—because I still get the coherence of listening to full albums, but the bands and styles of music come out in an almost pseudorandom series so I get to hear music I might not be looking for. Today, iTunes happened to be sorted by year, so this list contains a disproportionate number of songs from 1992. After finishing this album it moved on to…

5) Operation Ivy – Here We Go Again
I don’t think I’ve heard this song in 10 years, and it’s still so good. The lyrics are amazing, insightful, and always relevant:

Analyzed the world I was born into, but I could never understand
Knew I never wanted to grow up if that meant being a “man”
Dominating strict competition is the meaning of our lives
Stomping on the weak keeps us the winner of the battle in our minds

6) Beastie Boys – Professor Booty
Yet another ‘92 release. Again, this whole album was really inspiring to me growing up. Good beats, clever rhymes… this track wins for the line, “I been though many times in which I thought I might lose it. They only thing that saved me, has always been music.”

7) Russian Circles – Harper Lewis
I have to include at least one item in the list that I haven’t been able to stop listening to for weeks, and this is it. Again, this whole album is excellent. All the interweaving layers, shifting drums, build ups and light/heavy interplay that I love. For whatever reason the drums really stand out to me. They’re relatively simple, but I don’t think the drummer ever uses the same beat twice in the whole album. This particular track reminds me of one of my favorite things that I’ve been missing in the Bay Area. Like a thunderstorm, it starts out with rumbling toms and bass in the distance, then comes a light trickle of guitar, then the pressure builds and builds until… wait for it… wait for it… here it comes… CRACK!… BOOOM! DOWNPOUR! No link because you need to go get this yourself and listen to it on something with bass. Lots of bass. Headphones need not apply.

7.5) (’cause I can never stick to rules) Crass – The Immortal Death
This one’s been stuck in my head for a few days now, for a reason I can’t quite mention yet. Crass were masters of managing tension, building it up and up and up until it exploded and collapsed into chaos, combining harsh guitar tone, driving drums, and both vocals and lyrics pushing the uncomfortableness to eleven. This epic, written in response to the idiotic Falklands War, exposed the connection between war, gender, sexuality and death and is ever relevant today.

Alright, now I’m supposed to find seven people to pass this to? Let’s go with Anouk, since she just asked about it, Matt, Bob, and Joe, since I know they have taste and are in dire need of an update; and John, Jon, and Seppo, ’cause I know they have taste and will probably do it.

Just a week earlier, I had gone early in the morning to pick up our visas at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. When I got there, I found a long line of people leading down the sidewalk and a convoy of news vans and police cars. The entrance to the building had been roped off with police tape and a large black mark scarred the steel shutter guarding the door. Earlier that morning, someone had thrown an incendiary device at the Consulate. The social unrest that had recently exploded in Tibet and spilled over into the nearby western provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Xinjiang had spread all the way across the Pacific Ocean.

SF Olympic Torch demonstration.
Photo: Christina

I had begun reading about the protests heating up in Tibet, after decades of active, peaceful demonstration, and becoming bloody with Chinese paramilitary police firing their weapons directly into crowds and killing many people. With the Beijing Olympics rapidly approaching, the Chinese government is trying to eradicate all traces of dissent and whitewash its appearance. As the saying goes, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”, but by now the foundation has rotted, and every strike of the hammer resonates vibrations that pop up five more. What China has not learned from history is that the harder they clamp down the more people will resist. The resistance itself is taking advantage of the international attention focused on China, brought by the Olympics, to gain it’s own visibility and sympathy.

A few weeks earlier, I met someone at a book fair who was quite a bit more familiar with China and its politics. He advised me to be careful talking about politics with the locals, especially those in the eastern part of the country, as they are quite sensitive on the matter. The guide books I read said to avoid it all together. Why is this, I wonder? Is it nationalist loyalty to the government? Or merely an apolitical stance stemming from having carved out a comfortable position in life, and not wanting to be disturbed by Tibetan separatism, Taiwanese independence, and Hong Kong autonomy. Are they just trying to thrive?

By the time we were set up in our hotel, I had already broken numerous laws just by bringing my laptop into the country, containing cryptographic programs allowing me to check my Umich email using PuTTY SSH or log onto my work’s VPN network. So what was a few more? I wanted to check out the extents of the Great Firewall of China, the internet censorship that I had heard so much about. Wikipedia was blocked. Google was not, as they have a complicit agreement with the Chinese government to block questionable content. But Wikipedia results still showed up in Google Search, including snippets of text from the blocked sites. Come on, Google, you guys are supposed to be the masters of information; I thought you’d be better at this. If you can’t even handle that, what are you going to do once all the Tibetans learn to type in l33t-speak? I attempted to circumvent the blocks by viewing Googles cache of the page, to no avail (but I didn’t think to check archive.org). Of course, it was no problem to connect to a computer back in the US over VPN and view whatever I wanted, but this is not something most Chinese citizens have the opportunity to do.

Through this all, I was reminded by my internal soundtrack of the perils of such high concentrations of power and authority. The aforementioned Red Sparrowes album beautifully tells the story, merely with inordinately long song titles and instrumental music, of the Great Leap Forward campaign and the millions of people who starved to death as an ultimate result. While weather conditions were partially to blame, the main cause was a combination of poor planning by so few by leaders, so far removed from the majority of people and separated by so many levels of hierarchy, with each level trying to ingratiate themselves with their superiors. (Which doesn’t actually sound too different from our modern corporations, just on a much larger scale.)

Nanjing Road, Shanghai.
Photo: me

How the western press can continue to refer to China as “communist” is beyond me. From what I saw and what I’ve read, China is unlike any description of communism I have ever come across. With the economic changes begun by Deng Xiaoping and expanded under Jiang Zemin, the country maintains a market economy much closer to capitalism but with many state-owned businesses mingling with private enterprises. Everywhere I looked there were influences of western capitalism and consumerism. Chains like McDonalds and Starbucks were scattered throughout the city. The hotels in Shanghai were almost entirely run by American franchises. But when it comes to governing, China is authoritarian to the core. The government tightly restricts who can cross its borders. The government tells the press what it cannot print. The government tells people what they cannot view on the internet.

Poster by Michael Parisi and Rebecca
Cadman via Eyeteeth

But despite their best efforts—no matter how many journalists are kicked out of the country, nor how much censorship the Chinese government forces on the press or the internet—once information is free, there is no way to control it. Indeed, as the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism points out, as China’s government starts blocking large, general purpose sites like YouTube just to prevent their people from seeing protest videos, they will only upset more people who use the site for non-threatening purposes, in turn spurring more people to become dissidents themselves.

The rise in information technology has brought about a democratization of information. Just as the abundance of digital cameras set free a Critical Mass rider in Minneapolis, so too will it liberate China. Every tourist has become a foreign correspondent. Any kid with a cellphone camera can be an investigative reporter. Videos and (graphic) photos depicting police suppression of demonstrations in Tibet and nearby provinces surfaced on wikileaks.org mere days after the actions had occurred.

While the Chinese government may block direct access to such websites, there is no way they can prevent the information from spreading. Peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols like BitTorrent bypass the need for central (and therefore, controllable) servers altogether and in some cases, can even provide a degree of anonymity for the end-user. The RIAA has been entirely unsuccessful at stopping the sharing of music files. How long will it be until the Chinese people have vast networks of shared, otherwise prohibited, user-created news, artwork, and opinions completely circumventing any central authority? Will the revolution be televised on YouTube?

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I’ve been listening to a lot of… I guess it’s called “post-rock”, lately. Without going off on a tangent on why “post-rock” is a horrible term… let’s just say that I’ve been enjoying more complex beats and rhythms, layered compositions and, when applicable, my usual taste for the juxtaposition of crushing heaviness and beautiful harmony. I picked up the latest Pelican album, City of Echoes, from Underground Sounds when I was in Ann Arbor a few months ago, along with Maserati’s Inventions for the New Season (top notch) and a tip from the owner to check out Ypsilanti-natives Red Light Chamber Choir (a little derivative of some Constellation bands, but definitely worth (more than) the price).

So, back to City of Echoes. It’s a good album; I’ve listened to it countless times since. It’s lighter than their other stuff, from what I’m told (it’s the first I’ve heard of theirs), so perhaps they are on a similar trajectory as their obvious influence, Isis. Though, it reminds me, curiously, of a band that I haven’t thought about in a while, The Honor System. Incidentally, both bands hail from Chicago, which may have more than a little to do with their similar influences and sounds.

Tracks like City of Echoes, Spaceship Broken – Parts Needed, and Far from Fields sound reminiscent of the slower, meandering, instrumental parts in The Honor System’s songs like Facelift, and Flight from their first album, Single File. Released in 2000 by Asian Man Records, the album was somewhat ahead of it’s time, and also a little out of place on its label. While their sound was a logical extension of previous Asian Man band, The Broadways—they shared both guitarist/singer Dan Hanaway and drummer Rob DePaola—on a label full of upbeat pop-punk and ska releases, especially during the oversaturation and subsequent fall of ska(core), one can imagine they had a hard time finding an audience, especially with their slower, heavier, more complex post-punk/rock/metal leanings.

For example, their use of jarring, repeated, monotonic guitar riffs towards the end of Facelift (@2:35) pre-dates Isis’ similar approach in Deconstructing Towers (@2:50) on their 2001 album Celestial, although, staying true to their punk roots, The Honor System’s take is shorter and faster. Even the guitar tones foreshadow (modern) post-rock, particularly Pelican, with cleaner leads poking holes of harmony through the wall of dense distortion provided by the rhythm guitar, with a wandering bass line behind it. The drums are slightly more standard, supporting the conventional verse structure, which is punctuated by more experimental, instrumental interludes instead of choruses. If you were remove all the vocals from Single File (which I would highly discourage, as they’re wonderful) I suspect it would sound very similar to City of Echoes.

Anyway, since I started looking up The Honor System again, I found out that Dan and Honor System bassist Chris Carr have re-conspired with a new band, Whale|Horse, and just released an album, Count the Electric Sheep (er, on closer inspection it was released back in late 2006). My copy just arrived, and I can’t wait to listen.

First off, the format could not be more perfect. The whole thing comes wrapped in your standard 12-inch gate-fold record sleeve, displaying the muddily beautiful artwork of bassist Carl Auge. Inside, the package contains both (blue) vinyl and CD versions of the album, satisfying both the audiophiles and punk purists desire for a near-obsolete format, and saving me the trouble of downloading the mp3’s to burn a portable version for my discman; all for a measly sum of eleven bucks.

As for the music… both the guitar, played by George Wunderlich, and bass pluck haunting melodies amidst sparse vocals ranging from clean, but raspy whispers to deep, hoarse shouting and desperate screams (contributed by all members of the band), all of which evokes walking through an unfamiliar forest in the deep of night, with only the light of the moon breaking through the trees occasionally to light the way. When the music does kick into overdrive, it doesn’t so much build up slowly in an epic fashion as it does trip over the thick kudzu vines, stumbling headfirst into the raging, titular river.

The whole album aims to fill the listener with a general sense of unease, aided significantly by the shifting time-signatures and unusual, complex rhythms provided by drummer Jason Willer; with beats popping up unexpectedly, or absent from places they should seem to be. At some points the meter repeats, not in a familiar 4/4 time, but more like that of a needle skipping across a record, playing the same part over and over, but cutting off abruptly each time. The uncomfortableness reaches its peak with a voice-over recording accompanying the antepenultimate track, spouting conspiracy theory; where the listener has no choice but to ask themselves if the band actually believes what is being claimed, or if it was included just to add to the atmosphere of tension… and to wonder what life would be like if such things were really true. And why does our money have that pyramid with the eye on it, anyway?

A friend of mine died of cancer a few years ago. She was my age. The only consoling aspect is that she lived more in her short life than most people live in their entire 75-year life expectancy. She is a constant source of inspiration to me, and for that I am forever grateful.

Goodbye Ellen, you live on in our hearts and minds more than you’ll ever know.